The word “latte”, which English speakers use when referring to
coffee with milk, actually means “milk” in Italian. If you order a “latte” in Italy, they would
serve you milk. If you want coffee with
milk in Italy, you should order a cappuccino instead.
Just as it is important to identify good leadership to be nurtured and emulated, it is important to identify bad leadership, and either address it, or avoid these failures. Leadership is not authority. Leadership is not titles. Leadership is a process. That process is the science of maximising resources and the efforts of subordinates, by providing them with a common vision, and a map to move towards that vision, while creating the foundation for continued success. This means developing the people we lead.
One of the key indicators of bad leadership is failure to recognise the good work of others. This is borne of arrogance and ignorance. This also happens when people acquire authority beyond their abilities and are unable to understand the work put into projects and making things run. Another reason is not so much failure to recognise good work, but insecurity that treats good work of subordinates as a threat to his authority. Leaders like these do not engender loyalty. Managing people means having an instinctive grasp of psychology of people. People who receive recognition and praise increase their productivity, they increase their engagement, and are more likely to commit. This job satisfaction is paid forward in better customer interaction.
Another quality of bad leadership is disrespect of people. A bad leader is rude and disrespectful to subordinates. Examples of this behaviour include shifting blame to subordinates, refusing to take responsibility for the actions of his team, disparaging them to colleagues in their absence, criticising them in front of their peers, and refusing to exercise decision making. This is a lack of integrity. People like these cannot be trusted.
Bad leaders are typically terrible communicators. They say too much, they say too little, they send the wrong message, or they refuse to provide clear direction. This is tied to a refusal to take responsibility, low self-esteem, or simply having no discernible direction. These are leaders of the status quo.
Coming back to the lack of integrity, leaders such as these cultivate some at the expense of others, and exercise favouritism. They make questionable decisions, and while they may not be dishonest with regards financial gain or personal benefit, they are not honest with their management. Such leaders leave behind cliques and infighting. In such an environment, promotion and advancement is determined less about qualification and accomplishment, and more about relationship with the right people.
Identifying bad leadership is merely the first step in a
process. Once it has been identified, it
must be addressed. Depending on the
nature of the organisation, this process may be complex. It varies from non-profit to profit, from
corporate to command hierarchies, from private sector to public sector. There is no one way. Addressing it depends on our position in the
hierarchy and relative power in the system.
All that said, forewarned is forearmed.
“Facetious” is the only word in the English language where all the
vowels appear in the correct order.
The joke: The “umbrella” was originally going to be called “brella”,
but the inventor hesitated.
The surface level is the pun: the inventor hesitated, the
hesitation sound became part of the name, and “umbrella” is therefore the
accidental monument to one man’s uncertainty.
The deeper level is that the explanation is linguistically plausible
enough to produce genuine cognitive hesitation in the listener before the
mechanism is detected. That moment of
authentic uncertainty — in someone who knows language well enough to evaluate
the claim — is the joke’s actual achievement.
The Actual Etymology
“Umbrella” entered English in the early seventeenth century, from
the Italian “ombrella” — itself a diminutive of “ombra”, meaning
shade or shadow. The root is the Latin “umbra”
— shadow — which also gives English “umbrage,” “adumbrate,” and the
astronomical term for the darkest region of an eclipse shadow.
“Ombrella” literally means “little shadow.” The object was named for its primary
function: the creation of portable shade.
The English adopted the word, adjusted the orthography, and retained the
Italian diminutive suffix “-ella” intact — one of the more elegant
borrowings in English’s long career of wholesale vocabulary acquisition from
every language it has encountered.
The first recorded English use appears in 1609 in a letter by the
poet and cleric John Donne, who referenced “large umbrellas” used in hot
climates as sunshades. Rain protection
came later, in a culture where rain was considerably more pressing than
sunshine. The first Englishman
documented as carrying an umbrella publicly against rain was Jonas Hanway —
merchant, philanthropist, and apparently a man of considerable personal
conviction — who did so consistently through the streets of London from
approximately 1750 onward. He endured
sustained public mockery. Sedan chair
carriers and coachmen viewed the umbrella as an existential commercial threat
and were reportedly his most vocal critics.
Hanway persisted for approximately thirty years regardless. He did not hesitate.
The Rhetoric of the False Etymology
The joke belongs to a specific rhetorical category: the plausible
absurdity. It works not because it is
obviously funny but because it requires the listener to perform a genuine
evaluative operation before arriving at the correct conclusion. The mechanism is what classical rhetoric
called “paraprosdokian”, a figure of speech in which the latter part of a
sentence or statement surprises the audience in a way that causes them to
reframe the earlier part. The setup
establishes a conventional framing. The
punchline disrupts it. The cognitive
work of reframing is experienced as pleasure, which is, in structural terms,
what a joke actually is.
But the umbrella joke adds a layer that pure paraprosdokian does
not require: it is momentarily believable.
The listener does not immediately identify it as absurd because the
claim — that a word’s origin involves a hesitation sound — is not obviously
impossible. Languages incorporate
onomatopoeia, accidental phonetic convergence, and mishearing into their
vocabulary with considerable regularity.
The claim is evaluated against genuine linguistic knowledge before being
rejected.
The Linguistics of Hesitation
The joke’s premise — that a hesitation sound could accidentally
name something — is linguistically more interesting than it first appears,
because hesitation phenomena are a genuine and extensively studied subject. The filled pause — the “um,” “er,” or “uh”
that speakers insert during processing, is universal across human languages,
though the specific sounds vary considerably.
English uses “um” and “uh.”
French uses “euh.”
Japanese uses “eto” and “ano.” German uses “äh” and “ähm.” Dutch uses “um” and “eh.” The universality suggests the phenomenon is
not culturally acquired but reflects something structural in the relationship
between speech production and cognitive processing.
Dr. Herbert H. Clark of Stanford University, whose research on
hesitation phenomena and speech acts is foundational to psycholinguistics,
demonstrated that filled pauses are not random noise but functional
signals. They communicate to the
listener that the speaker is processing and will continue — distinguishing a
productive pause from a completed utterance.
They are, in a technical sense, meaningful rather than meaningless,
which is why listeners find prolonged silence more disruptive than filled
pauses of equivalent duration.
The “um/uh” distinction has attracted specific scholarly
attention. Research by Professor Martin Corley
of the University of Edinburgh found that “um” and “uh” are not interchangeable
— “um” tends to precede longer pauses and more significant reformulations,
while “uh” precedes shorter pauses and minor corrections. Speakers use them differently, and listeners
interpret them differently, even without conscious awareness of doing so.
This body of research makes the umbrella joke linguistically richer
than it appears. The joke assumes the
listener knows “um” as a hesitation marker — which everyone does, consciously
or not. It then proposes that this
marker entered a word’s etymology, which the linguistically informed listener
knows is implausible but not impossible.
The evaluation of the claim requires genuine linguistic knowledge. The joke rewards that knowledge by making the
evaluative process itself part of the comic experience.
The Etymology of Hesitation
The word “um” as a hesitation sound has its own etymological
interest. It appears in English from at
least the seventeenth century as an interjection — the Oxford English
Dictionary’s earliest citation dates to 1671.
Its origin is uncertain — it may be a natural vocalisation of the
closed-mouth humming sound produced when the vocal tract is active, but no
specific phonemes are being formed, which would make it one of the few English
words whose etymology is the sound itself rather than a borrowing from another
language.
The related “hum” — as in “hum and haw,” meaning to hesitate or be
indecisive — shares this phonetic base. “Hem
and haw” is the American variant. Both
idioms preserve the connection between the nasal humming sound of hesitation
and the concept of uncertainty or indecision that the umbrella joke exploits.
False Etymology as a Rhetorical Device
The umbrella joke belongs to a broader tradition of false
etymologies — folk etymologies — that have shaped both language and culture in
ways that are simultaneously fascinating and unreliable. Folk etymology is the process by which
speakers reinterpret an unfamiliar word’s origin in terms that are phonetically
similar and semantically plausible. The
word “posh” — British slang for elegant or upper-class — is conventionally said
to derive from “Port Out, Starboard Home,” the preferred cabin positions on
voyages to India that avoided direct sunlight.
This etymology is almost certainly false — no documentary evidence
supports it — but it is so plausible and so frequently repeated that it has
effectively displaced the actual unknown origin in popular understanding.
“Golf” is claimed by some to stand for “Gentlemen Only, Ladies
Forbidden” — a backronym constructed long after the word’s actual Scottish
origin. “News” is claimed to represent
the four cardinal directions — North, East, West, South — despite the word
deriving straightforwardly from “new things.”
“Tip” as a gratuity is claimed to stand for “To Insure Promptitude” —
another backronym with no historical basis.
These false etymologies persist because they are more satisfying
than the truth. They explain something
that previously seemed arbitrary. They
impose a narrative on what was mere historical accident. They give the word a story. The umbrella joke operates in this tradition
— but with the crucial difference that it is obviously a joke rather than a
sincere false etymology. The comic
effect depends on the listener recognising the falseness. A sincere false etymology persuades. A comic false etymology reveals itself and
invites the listener to enjoy the revelation.
The distinction between these two — the sincere false etymology and
the comic one — is the distinction between rhetoric as manipulation and
rhetoric as play. Both exploit the same
cognitive mechanism: the human preference for narrative over arbitrariness, for
explanation over accident. The joke
makes this preference visible by exploiting it in a context where the
exploitation is acknowledged.
The Accident of Naming
The deeper linguistic point embedded in the joke is one that
serious etymology confirms: many things are called what they are called for
reasons that are arbitrary, accidental, or historical rather than logical. The salary derives from the Latin “salarium”
— related to salt — because Roman soldiers were partly paid in salt or given a
salt allowance. The word “hazard” — now
associated with risk and danger — supposedly derives from the Arabic “az-zahr,”
meaning dice, because gambling was considered the archetypal risky activity,
although that origin is now contested. “Companion”
derives from the Latin “com panis” — “with bread” — because sharing a
meal was the original marker of close association. “Disaster” derives from the Italian “disastro”
— bad star — because adverse celestial alignment was considered the cause of
catastrophic events.
These etymologies reveal that the words we use to describe the
world carry within them the assumptions, beliefs, and material conditions of
the cultures that formed them. A salary
is etymologically a salt allowance. A
disaster is etymologically a bad star.
The words are accidental monuments to beliefs and conditions that no
longer exist. The umbrella is,
etymologically, a little shadow. The
joke proposes that it is instead a monument to hesitation. The proposal is false. But it is false in a way that illuminates
something true: that the names of things are arbitrary, that they could have
been otherwise, and that the gap between what a word sounds like and what it
actually means is a space in which wit can operate with considerable freedom.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
Language
has a gift for ambiguity. It produces
moments of genuine comedy that no satirist could manufacture, because the
collision between two perfectly innocent linguistic traditions produces results
that would not pass a content moderation filter in polite English company.
The
word “พร” (porn)
in Thai means a blessing, specifically a sacred blessing, a divine gift, an
auspicious bestowal. It derives from the
Sanskrit “vara” (वर), meaning a boon or a wish granted by a deity. The Sanskrit root travels through Pali into
Thai, retaining its sacred connotation entirely intact. In the Thai cultural context, incorporating “porn”
into a name is an act of piety — the parents are expressing the hope that their
child carries divine favour through life.
The
English-speaking world has other associations with the word. These associations are not sacred. They are not pious. They are not the kind of thing one typically
invokes when naming a child. The result
is a category of legitimate Thai names that cause English speakers to perform a
rapid double-take when encountered in formal contexts.
The Examples
Pornsak (พรศักดิ์)
— “porn” meaning sacred blessing combined with “sak” (ศักดิ์) meaning
power, honour, or dignity. The name,
therefore, means “the power of sacred blessings” or “dignified with divine
favour.” In English transliteration, it
presents rather differently.
Pornthip (พรทิพย์)
— “porn” combined with “thip” (ทิพย์) meaning divine or celestial –
“divinely blessed” or “celestial blessing.”
A genuinely beautiful name in its linguistic origin. An interesting introduction in an
English-speaking professional context.
Pornpimol (พรพิมล) — “porn”
combined with “pimol” (พิมล) meaning pure or immaculate – “the pure blessing.” Theologically impeccable. Diplomatically complicated.
Pornpan (พรพรรณ) — “Blessing
of beauty.”
Pornphat (พรภัทร) — “prosperous
blessing.”
Pornprapha (พรประภา)
— “radiant blessing.”
The
pattern continues across hundreds of Thai given names with complete sincerity
and complete unawareness of the English phonetic problem.
Thailand’s
population is approximately 72 million.
A meaningful percentage of them carry “porn” as a component of
their given name. This is not a fringe
linguistic phenomenon. It is a
mainstream naming convention in one of Southeast Asia’s most significant
economies — a country that receives approximately 40 million international
tourists annually, many of whom encounter Thai name badges, business cards, and
email signatures without adequate linguistic preparation.
The Taxonomy of False Friends
The
linguist’s term for this phenomenon is a false friend (faux ami in
French, which is where the English term originates). Words that look or sound alike across
languages but carry entirely different meanings. The Thai “porn” is a cross-script
false friend — it does not look like the English word in Thai script, but its
romanisation produces an identical string.
The
romanisation is the problem. Thai script
—อักษรไทย
(akson thai) — is an abugida derived from Khmer script, itself derived
from Brahmi through the Pallava script of South India. The word “พร” looks nothing like the English word “porn” in its
native script. The collision occurs
entirely in the transliteration — the moment someone decided that “พ” renders as “p”
and “ร” renders as “r”
and the vowel pattern produces “o” in between.
Romanisation
systems for Thai are not standardised with the rigour one might hope for. The Royal Thai General System of
Transcription — the official standard — produces “phon” for “พร”, not “porn”. The “porn” rendering comes from
informal romanisation practices that prioritise phonetic approximation over the
official system. Had the official system
been universally applied, “Pornsak” would be “Phonsak”, which
presents entirely differently to an English eye.
But
romanisation in practice is not a rigorous discipline. People romanise their names as they see fit,
as their parents decided, as the school register recorded, or as a foreign
teacher first wrote it down decades ago.
The result is that thousands of Thais carry English romanisations of
their names that produce reactions their parents did not intend, and their
bearers find either mildly irritating or quietly amusing, depending on their
disposition.
The Sanskrit Trail
The
“porn” element in Thai names is part of a much larger Sanskrit
linguistic inheritance that runs through Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Javanese,
Balinese, and to varying degrees most of the literary languages of mainland and
island Southeast Asia. Sanskrit arrived
in the region through Brahminical and Buddhist cultural transmission beginning
in the early centuries of the Common Era — a process scholars call “Indianisation”,
though the term is contested for implying a one-directional cultural flow
rather than a more complex process of selective adoption and local adaptation.
The
Sanskrit “vara” — boon, blessing, wish — became “phon” or “porn”
in Thai, “phon” in Lao, “vorn” in Khmer. The religious connotation remained stable
across the entire transmission. A
blessing invoked in a Sanskrit Vedic context retained its sacred character when
it entered Buddhist Theravada naming conventions across Southeast Asia.
None
of these cultures knew that a distant Germanic language evolving through Old
English, Middle English, and various French influences would eventually produce
a compound word — derived from the Greek “porneia” (πορνεία), meaning
sexual immorality, through “pornographia” (πορνογραφία) — that would
romanise into the same four letters.
The
Greeks, the Thais, and the English arrived at the same phonetic destination
through entirely different etymological routes and with entirely different
intentions. The result is a false friend
that is simultaneously completely innocent and completely impossible to explain
quickly at an international conference registration desk.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
Languages
do not evolve by committee. Nobody voted
to remove the “n” from “norange”. Nobody issued a decree. It happened the way most linguistic change
happens — gradually, unconsciously, through millions of ordinary people making
the same small error in the same direction until the error became the standard. The process has a name: rebracketing, or more
specifically, metanalysis. It occurs
when speakers misidentify the boundary between words — most commonly between an
indefinite article and the noun that follows it.
The Orange Problem
The
word entered English from the Old French “orange”, which derived from
the Arabic “nāranj” (نارنج), which came from the Persian “nārang”,
which came from the Sanskrit “nāraṅga”. The Arabic retained the initial “n”. The Spanish inherited it directly — “naranja”,
which is why the “n” is still sitting there in Madrid, unaware of its
English misfortune.
When
“norange” entered Middle English, speakers encountered “a norange” — the
indefinite article “a” followed by a word beginning with “n”. This is not an unusual construction. But “a norange” and “an orange” sound
identical when spoken at normal conversational speed. The boundary shifted. What was “a norange” becomes “an orange”. The “n” migrated from the noun to the article.
“An”
exists to smooth the sound before vowels. “An orange” flows more naturally than “a norange”
— which is why the rebracketed version stuck. The error was more euphonious than the
original. Languages are not governed by
etymological loyalty. They are governed
by what is easiest to say at speed.
The Pattern Is Not Unique to Orange
Metanalysis
has reshaped English vocabulary more extensively than most speakers realise. “Apron” was originally “napron” — from
the Old French “naperon”, related to “napkin”. The same “n” migration produced “apron” from “a
napron”. The French connection survives
in “napkin” and “nappe”.
“Adder”
— the snake — was originally “nadder” in Old English. “A nadder” became “an adder”. The snake lost its letter, and nobody noticed
until etymologists arrived centuries later.
“Umpire”
derived from the Old French “nonpeer”, meaning “not equal” — referring
to the third party who breaks a tie. “A
noumpere” became “an oumpere” became “umpire”. The sporting world has been using a
rebracketed French legal term ever since.
The
reverse process also occurs. “A newt”
was originally “an ewt” or “an ewte” — the “n” migrated from the article
to the noun. “A nickname” derived from “an
ekename” — an additional name. The “n”
moved in the opposite direction, absorbed by the noun rather than surrendered
to the article.
What This Tells Us About Language
The
linguist’s observation is straightforward: language is not a system designed
and maintained. It is a system that
emerges and evolves. The rules are
descriptive, not prescriptive. They
document what speakers actually do, not what grammarians think they should do. Prescriptivists — the self-appointed
guardians of “correct” language — resist this conclusion with remarkable
tenacity. The split infinitive is wrong,
they say. “Hopefully” as a sentence
adverb is incorrect. “Decimate” means to
reduce by one-tenth, not to destroy comprehensively. These objections share a common structural
flaw: they appeal to an earlier usage as the authoritative standard, without
explaining why that particular historical moment represents the correct
terminus of linguistic evolution. Latin
speakers watching their language become French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
and Romanian would have had opinions about the deterioration of standards. They would have been irrelevant. Language evolved anyway.
“Orange”
lost its n because English speakers found “an orange” easier to say than “a
norange”. The “n” did not disappear
because anyone decided it should. It
disappeared because nobody noticed it going. By the time anyone might have objected, the
objection would have required arguing that the entire English-speaking world
was wrong. The entire English-speaking
world, in these matters, is never wrong. It is simply doing what it has always done —
finding the path of least resistance between meaning and sound, and following
it wherever it leads.
Spanish,
meanwhile, held its ground. “Naranja”
sits in the Spanish lexicon with its “n” entirely intact, indifferent to
what happened north of the Pyrenees. The
Arabic “nāranj” would recognise it immediately. The English orange, however, has forgotten
where it came from. As most things do,
given sufficient time.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club
Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
